First impressions

Greg Louis (glouis@dynamicro.on.ca)
Sun, 31 Mar 1996 14:29:45 -0500 (EST)

To whom, if any :), it may interest: Here are some early
impressions. Really early: I'm a newbie working for the first time
with thot after an installation done yesterday. Although I've read
through the manual with some care, some of the things I ran into may
still be RTFM problems; if so, the question is whether the UI is a
bit counterintuitive in those areas, or whether it's just my lack of
intuition that's to blame ;-)

1. I haven't seen a way to set the default geometry for a view
window.
2. It would be nice to have 8.5x14 as well as 8.5x11 "US" paper
sizes. Also, all four margins should be settable for each type of
presentation, and I haven't found any way to change the defaults.
3. To align the printing area with the printable area on my laser
printer pages, I have to set a right margin of +5 and a top margin
of -15mm. It would be nice if thot didn't forget those settings
between sessions.
4. When the vertical margin is being set in the Print/Change Format
dialogue, it initially reads 0 but changes to 300 as soon as a
character is typed.
5. If one selects a group of simple paragraphs and applies the
...... layout option, and subsequently switches them back to
left-flush, paragraphs with only one line are not restored to the
initial layout.
6. View names are displayed in French, and French presentation
forms are displayed as default selections (RapportP not RapportPE)
even though most other displays are English (with the environment
variable LANG=en).
7. Presentation selections in the document-creation sequence should
offer pick lists and not just defaults, IMHO.
8. The "fixed" width of a tree node should be settable. The height
of a variable-width node should be settable in lines. This is
especially crucial for horizontally-oriented trees of more than two
layers' depth, as it's easy to run off the page altogether with the
"variable" width, while the "fixed" width is awfully chunky-looking.
9. If one selects Attribute Node outline, the resulting dialogue
has no confirm or done buttons. Closing the dialogue causes thot to
die at the next operation, with an "Irrecoverable error" message.
That's as far as I've gotten.

All these teething-trouble infelicities aside, I find thot admirable
in concept. It will be a powerful and enjoyable tool to work with
when it matures.

| G r e g L o u i s | pgp:mail key@PublicKey.com |
| http://www.consultronics.on.ca/~bgl | glouis@consultronics.on.ca |
| Censorship is arbitrary denial | 77 0B 39 81 28 CE 7D D0 |
| substituted for rational debate! | 4C 7A 6E CC E7 21 4C 55 |